17:15-17:30 Clausura

17:30-19:30 Cervezas heladas y tacos

2 Abstracts

In 2008, Mexican legislators approved a reform to the criminal justice system, which opened the door to oral and adversarial procedures at a national level. Our project examines the role of judicial empathy within the new criminal justice system, focusing on criminal court judges both at the federal, and at the local levels (the latter only in Mexico City). The main hypothesis we want to explore in our empirical work is that there is not only one model of “good judicial empathy”, just as there is not only one model of a what it means to be a “good judge”. There is a variety of ways in which the administration of justice can be carried out virtuously. Depending on the judge’s “original emotional and psychic endowment,” there will be different strategies available to her in order to deal with the kind of empathy (or the lack thereof) she are capable of, as she tries to be impartial and just. The problem is not necessarily to show or display this or that kind of empathy, but to know how to deal in the best way possible with your emotional endowment. We will explore the strategies that judges have on this score, and advocate the development of different exemplars of judges regarding empathy. Arriba

The new Latin American constitutionalism (NLC) is the term that has been coined to refer to certain constitutional processes and constitutional reforms that have taken place relatively recently in Latin America. Constitutional theorists have not been very optimistic regarding the scope and nature of this new constitutionalism. I thoroughly agree with this critical skepticism as well as with the idea that this new phenomenon does not substantively change the organic element of the different constitutions in the region. However, I argue that it is a mistake to focus analysis on this characteristic. My intention is to show that the NLC should be evaluated in the context of its relationship with contemporary neo-constitutional theory. Arriba

In the present study, we inquire whether different dimensions of state capacity at the subnational level in Mexico hold a relation with citizens’ political engagement. We test two general hypotheses. The first one proposes that strong subnational states (with bureaucratic cohesion, extractive capacity, extraterritorial recognition and capacity to steer key local social and economic factors) provide incentives and conditions favorable for conventional forms of participation. The second hypothesis claims that where subnational state capacities are weak, people expect poor or null performance of subnational policies, and therefore turn away from conventional participation, and instead turn to protest or community participation. To test these hypotheses, we use multilevel survey data from N=11,000 Mexican citizens in the 32 Mexican states in 2013. We test whether individuals’ propensity to engage in different forms of participation (conventional participation, political protest, or community participation) are moderated by differences in subnational state capacities. This study makes three contributions to extant research. First, we complement previous research on citizens’ involvement in policy, and extend it in order to understand consequences of strong or weak capacities at the subnational level. Second, we empirically study different types of citizens’ participation. This allows for a more fine-tuned analysis of individual-level political consequences of subnational state capacities. In particular, this approach allows for a comparison of citizens’ responses to differences in local policy, as well as local institutional and bureaucratic differences. Third, we empirically test our arguments using cross-sectional data from a large sample of Mexican citizens combined with independently collected data on state capacity for all Mexican states. Arriba

An extensive literature on electoral systems has investigated how runoff rules affect players’ strategic decisions regarding how many candidacies to run and whom to vote for in the first round. Yet another crucial feature of runoff systems is that they allow for a reversion of the first-round results –i.e., the plurality winner of the first round may be defeated in the second round. Does winning the first round increase the probability of winning the second round? Is there a threshold or a gap after which plurality winners should feel safe for winning the next round? In this paper we investigate these questions with data from national elections since 1945, as well as subnational elections from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that being the most voted candidate in the first round has a substantial causal effect on the probability of winning the second round. Arriba

This paper unpacks the formal and informal opportunities for fraud during the 1988 presidential election in Mexico. In particular, I study how the alteration of vote returns came after an electoral reform that centralized the vote-counting process. Using an original image database of the vote-tally sheets for that election, and applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to analyze the sheets, I find evidence of blatant alterations in about a third of the tallies in the country. The empirical analysis shows that altered tallies were more prevalent in polling stations where the opposition was not present and in states controlled by governors with grassroots experience of managing the electoral operation. This research has implications for understanding the ways in which autocrats control elections as well as introducing a new methodology to audit the integrity of vote tallies. Arriba

This paper experimentally analyzes the conditions under which Mexican join interest organizations. As part of the 2017 Mexico Organizational Survey we presented 1,400 citizens in two Mexican states with flyers that describe a fictitious local interest organization (Lazos Comunitarios) and provided them with an opportunity to sign up to receive information about joining the organization. These posters contain one of four randomly selected types of appeals to encourage member recruitment, including: assisting members in accessing disaggregable state resources, offering self-generated services to members, contributing to local public goods, and appealing to civic duty, as well as a placebo control with no direct appeal. By comparing the rates at which different treatment groups sign up to receive membership information we can estimate the effectiveness of different modes of selective and non-selective recruitment appeals, furthering understanding of the conditions under which citizens are intrinsically motivated to participate in politics. This approach builds on recent experimental research on the effect of various appeals on participation in contentious events (McClendon 2014) and signing a petition (Kuziemko et al. 2013), but is the first of its kind that predicts participation in interest organizations. Arriba

Abstract: Does the @realDonaldTrump really matter to financial markets? Research suggests that economic policy statements made by US President Donald J. Trump via microblogging site Twitter—known as "tweets"—should not matter to financial markets, as they merely restate his well-known economic policy views. In contrast, we argue that Trump's economic policy tweets clarify the level of his commitment to his economic policy goals, thereby affecting financial markets. We test our argument using data on Trump's Mexico-related policy tweets and the US dollar/Mexican peso exchange rate. We find that Trump's Mexico-related policy tweets raised US dollar/Mexican peso exchange rate volatility while his views were first becoming known to investors, in line with prior research. However, we also find that Trump's Mexico-related policy tweets continued to affect US dollar/Mexican peso exchange rate volatility, even after his Mexico-related policy views were known. We attribute this to the clarifying effect that these tweets had for investors about the level of Trump's commitment to his Mexico-related policy goals. Arriba